


I Leapt to Freedom

by AutiFics



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Autistic Castiel, Crazy Castiel, Fluff, Human Castiel, Mental Hospital, but he’s not crazy bc he’s autistic, lost wings, slight AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-25
Updated: 2018-11-02
Packaged: 2019-04-27 20:10:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14433174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AutiFics/pseuds/AutiFics
Summary: The angels had fallen and lost their wings almost a full two months ago, but Sam and Dean had still yet to hear from Castiel, who they assumed had lost his own grace. They were of course worried, but they were consumed with the aftermath of the trials and had no way of contacting or locating the angel away, and were left to hope that he contacted them first; instead, in some cruel twist of fate or one last humorous act of Chuck, it was Meg who called the Winchester brothers.





	1. The Road So Far

The angels had fallen and lost their wings almost a full two months ago, but Sam and Dean had still yet to hear from Castiel, who they assumed had lost his own grace. They were of course worried, but they were consumed with the aftermath of the trials and had no way of contacting or locating the angel away, and were left to hope that he contacted them first; instead, in some cruel twist of fate or one last humorous act of Chuck, it was Meg who called the Winchester brothers. 

———

Dean had gotten the call early in the morning. Like, really early in the morning. Like before the ass-crack of dawn early. He had half a mind to shut the phone off and go back to sleep, but the other half of his mind reasoned that it could be Cas, or another hunter, or anybody that he would be interested in hearing from. So, against the power of his own will, he had answered. 

“Who’s this?” He had asked groggily, sitting up and pinching the bridge of his nose in an attempt to wake himself up. 

“Mary Hatch, is this George Bailey?” Came the familiar, bitter, sarcastic voice. He could practically see the sadistic look on her face. 

“Meg?” Dean exclaimed, sitting up all the way, baffled at what he thought he heard. 

“The one and only,” the demon. He could see her eye roll in his head, “I found your boyfriend.”

“Huh?” He ran a hand through his hair in an attempt to wake himself up. 

“Your boyfriend,” she repeated slower, “Sad blue eyes, messy hair, dirty trench coat—ringing a bell?”

“You mean Cas?”

“No, the other blue-eyed man draped in a trench coat who has an obvious crush on you. You’re dumber than I thought,” she groaned. “Yes. I found Castiel.”

“Where?” He was awake now.

“He’s in a mental hospital in New England,” came the reticent answer. 

“Finally check in to sort out your sadistic tendencies?”

“Haha. Mental hospitals are good places for deals,” she reasoned. 

“That’s a new level of evil.”

“Hi, I’m Meg, I’m a demon,” she sighed. Again, he could see her eyes rolling. 

“Where’s the mental hospital? Is he okay? Is he open for visitors?”

“Hospital’s in Plymouth, called Saint Christina’s Center for the Mentally Ill. I’ll be his attending nurse for the next three days. After that you’re on your own.”

“What happens in three days?” He asked as he flopped off his bed to reach for his pants. 

“They’ll find out I don’t really have any medical qualifications.” Another reticent response. 

“Fine. Sam and I will be there some time tomorrow.”

“See ya, Winchester.” The line went dead, and Dean was left to explain to Sam what the hell had just happened over the phone. 

————

“How far out are we?” Sam asked. 

“GPS says we’re fifteen minutes away,” Dean read. He had been driving for twenty hours already, with only two breaks for sleep. They’d eaten fast food in the car (something Dean would have never allowed if it weren’t for the circumstances) to save time, and so far it was working. The trip from their bunker in Lebanon, Kansas should have taken twenty-five hours instead of just under twenty-one. 

“Did Meg say why he’s in a mental hospital to begin with?”

“No. Hung up before I could ask,” Dean recalled, checking the GPS on his phone to insure he was taking the right turn. 

“Sounds like her,” Sam mused. “I guess we’ll find out when we get there, huh?”

“I’d guess it has something to do with losing his wings.”

“Or telling a doctor that he’s an angel,” Sam almost laughed, “He never was good about lying.”

“Angels don’t lie,” Dean reasoned. “Did you find anything out about this hospital?”

“Saint Christina’s? Nothing big, nothing supernatural. It’s a mental health facility. There were a few bad reviews, but no reports of anyone dying, no reports of hauntings, nothing that would indicate it was anything other than normal.”

“Is it weird that a mental hospital is the most normal place we’ve been in the last ten minutes?”

“Eh,” Sam shrugged. “My perception’s a bit skewed. You’re taking the wrong turn.”

“I’m gonna stop by that fast food place before we get there.” 

“Dean, you had two burgers twenty minutes ago.”

“Not for me,” Dean laughed, “Cas likes hamburgers. He’s been in this hospital for a while, I’m guessing, and we both know the food in there ain’t good.”

“...Hello, how may I help you?” Came a voice through the speaker in front of the menu. 

“Hi, I’d like two cheeseburgers, an apple juice, and two large coffees with sugar.”

“Pull up to the window,” the voice ordered. 

“Two cheeseburgers?” Sam questioned as Dean drove Baby up to the next window. 

“He really likes them,” Dean laughed, “Dude, you should have seen him while we were hunting Famine, he ate forty of those things in the first half hour. I didn’t think angels could even eat food before that.”

“Fair enough,” Sam remarked as Dean leaned out the window to grab the bag and tray holding his order. 

“Here, hold these,” the older Winchester ordered the younger, “The hospital’s right down here anyway.”

“Meg said she would be the attending?”

“Yeah. She sent me a text earlier that said we could get in with the names Joseph and Nicholas Jonas.”

Sam laughed. “Like the Jonas brothers?”

“I think she’s trying to punish us for letting her die that one time,” Dean remarked as he turned down the road to pull into a parking lot in front of a brick building with two stories and large glass windows lining the walls. 

“This is the place?”

“Yep.”

“Did she say how he ended up here?”

“Just that she found him,” Dean took a deep breath, “I guess we should go in and see the damage, huh?” He pushed himself out of the car and braced himself against the doorway for a moment, trying to prepare himself for whatever state he would find his best friend in when they entered the facility.


	2. Castiel, Baby Without A Trenchcoat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How Castiel ended up at the hospital and ran into Meg.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There’s some internalized ableism in this one with Cas

Nobody listened to him when he told them the truth. He tried to tell the people who tied him down to the bed that they didn’t need to do that, because he couldn’t fly anymore anyway, not after his wings were ripped from his back. One of the women in rubbery blue clothes had patted his arm and given a sympathetic look, but for some reason he didn’t think she felt bad for his wings. When they brought him lunch he tried to tell them that he didn’t know how to eat, because he had been an angelic being for the last thousand years, but one of the rubbery-blue women sat beside his bed silently to feed him mushy food off a spoon. He choked once, and they tried to give him water, but he wouldn’t take it because it was new and scary and he didn’t know how to drink it. 

His vessel—well, no. He didn’t have a vessel anymore, it was just him. He had lost almost twenty pounds since they took him into the hospital. He couldn’t remember most of it. He remembered tumbling down to the Earth, and he remembered a burning on his back before his body collided with the ground, but after that things came in a blurry haze. There were flashing lights, and plenty of yelling, and a moving car that was going too fast. 

“He’s coming around,” someone had yelled, and he had reached up to cover his ears. Everything was too loud—why was everything so loud? “Do you know your name?” The same person yelled as they pried his hands away from his ears. 

“Mmm!” Was all he could manage, because his ears were full and his head was moving and his tongue was heavy. 

Shortly after he was admitted to the hospital for his injuries they decided to move him to a psychiatric facility, and while he couldn’t understand why, he could guess that it had something to do with his inability to act like he was a human. Dean had pointed it out more than once, but at least he’d had wings then. At least he’d be useful. What was it that Dean had called him that one time his powers had been blocked? A baby in a trench coat? That seemed to sum up what the hospital staff thought of him too, even though they had taken his trench coat so he wouldn’t hang himself. He had tried to explain that he couldn’t hang himself, because Heaven was closed, but the blue-clad nurses had given him more sympathetic smiles and reassuring pats. After the third time they had to strap him down in the first week they started playing ‘soothing music’ in his room, cheery voices belting out jovial songs that almost made him laugh when he imagined Dean’s commentary in his head. 

Now he was just a baby. He guessed that was an accurate description, in the most basic sense. He needed other people to feed him, and he had to have help drinking, and he needed to be contained in a single room with consistent supervision. The nurses kept a constant radio running in hopes of ‘calming him down.’ And, on top of that, he had no idea how to be a human. Just like a baby. 

“Castiel,” that was Dr. Hurley, the brown-haired woman with warm eyes and plump hips who visited him everyday to ask him the same three questions and record the answers on her intimidating clipboard. She almost had to strain to be heard over the unwanted music. “Could we talk for a moment?”

“No.” He had found—much to his frustration—that his tongue forgot how to form words when he was particularly upset (which was most of the time), and the hospital staff wasn’t as intuitive as Dean or Sam may have been. He had learned to struggle through single-word responses that mostly consisted of ‘no’ or ‘okay’ in the hopes that they would get the general idea of his thoughts. 

It made sense that Dr. Hurley would find a new nurse to look after Castiel on a more permanent basis, since he’d clashed with most of the other orderlies who had tried to control him. Most of them were bigger than him, guys with bulging muscles who were ready to tackle a patient who got too out of line, and that rubbed Castiel the wrong way. Maybe the Winchesters’ dislike for authority had rubbed off on him. Somehow, though, the nurses with the sad smiles and gentle touches were worse. They had sympathy for something that hadn’t happened, understanding for something he wasn’t experiencing, but they were so confident in their own ability to identify with what he was going through. Sometimes the lights got too bright or the noise got too loud, so he would curl up in the corner of his room, and one of the nurses would come put a hand on his shoulder or rub his arm. They didn’t listen when he tried to show them they were making it worse, burning his skin and confusing his brain and only strengthening his need to pick his skin or bang his head against the wall. 

He tried not to do that, though, because then they tied him down, and he was left struggling to tell them that they didn’t need to worry because his wings were long gone. 

“Castiel doesn’t like new people very much,” Dr. Hurley explained to someone beside her, “But I’m sure he’ll come around once you’ve spent some time together.”

“I’d like a few minutes just to get to know him, if that’s alright?” 

“Of course.” Dr. Hurley nodded and left as Cas buried his head in his arms, which were resting on top of his contracted knees. 

This was Laura’s shift. He wasn’t very fond of Laura—she was one of those women with sad smiles and unwanted touches—but he was fond of consistency. He liked knowing who was coming in and when they were leaving and when they would be coming in next. It was like a nice rotating door that he could follow with his mind, to bring sense to the gray noise that sometimes got so loud he couldn’t think about anything else. He heard footsteps walking towards him, but didn’t lift his head. He liked the darkness his arms provided. 

A familiar hand—small, with trimmed nails and soft fingertips and short fingers that were almost stubby but not quite—carded itself through Cas’ hair, and he found himself leaning into it. 

“What are you doing in here, Clarence?”

Cas’ head came up slowly. His hand reached up to touch the one that was resting in his head, and his legs unfolded themselves so he could sit up a bit taller, just to make sure that what he was seeing was real. 

“Meg,” he whispered, taking in every feature of the demon who had once been so familiar. He suddenly felt overcome with the desire to feel her hair between his fingers, to twist it and pinch it and just feel it. He’d never felt that when he had his wings. Maybe all humans felt that way about people’s hair? Dean had certainly never mentioned anything about that, nor had either of the Winchester brothers ever expressed a desire to feel anyone’s hair. Then again, Cas had more than enough reason to believe that his closest friends were not a good specimen for the analysis of the human race. 

“That’s me,” she moved her fingers away from his head and gave what was almost and indulgent smile. “What are you doing here? Winchesters finally drive you crazy?”

“No.”

“You want to explain what did happen?” She prompted with a raised eyebrow. 

“No.”

“Do you know what happened?”

“Wings,” he said, his voice suddenly becoming very gravelly and solemn. He had sounded absent just a minute ago, but now he was fully engaged. 

“You have no idea how you got here, do you?”

“No.”

“Okay,” Meg pinched the bridge of her nose and something in his head reminded him that was a sign of stress. 

Cas suddenly felt bad for not knowing how he had gotten there. Should he have known? Was he supposed to have listened to all the big words the doctors were using? He thought it was okay to let his mind wander, because the doctors were talking to each other and pretending that he wasn’t there. Was he wrong? 

“Sorry,” Cas reached out and clumsily pat his demon friend’s shoulder, silently cursing his limbs for having lost their dexterity and mobility. 

“Yeah, well,” Meg gave a sigh and flipped her hair over her shoulder as her bottom lip slipped between her teeth. “Did you have your phone with you when you lost your wings?”

“Yes.”

“In your coat?”

“Yes.” Dean had told him to keep the phone with him at all times, in case here was an emergency and one of them needed to contact the other. He said at the very least he would be able to annoy the angel for not answering prayers. 

“Alright. Tonight, when the night nurse comes to take my shift, I’m going to go down to Impound and find your things. You have Dean’s number in your phone?”

“Yes.” Only his, and Sam’s. He didn’t really know any other people besides ancient beings who used more celestial methods to communicate. 

“Good. I’ll call him, and he’ll come get you, and I can go back to my dastardly deeds. Deal?”

“Yes.”

“Now, I’m supposed to bring you to the Rec area.”

“Out?” Cas asked hopefully. 

“Sure. Come on, if I have to listen to this music anymore I’m going to need a room.”


	3. Bring Him Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean and Sam get to Cas.

“So, what exactly happened?” Dean asked Meg, who had met them in the lobby of the hospital before escorting them to an empty waiting room in the psychiatric ward. 

“I have no idea,” she answered casually. 

“No idea?” He repeated, staring at her. “What do you mean ‘no idea’? You’ve been with him for—”

“Thank you, Winchester, I am aware,” she interrupted. “He doesn’t know how he ended up here either.”

“What do you mean he doesn’t know?”

“Is there another language you would be more comfortable with?” She snapped. “He doesn’t know. He said something about his wings, but he has no idea how he got from wherever he was to being in a hospital.”

“He probably lost his wings,” Sam reasoned, “All of the other angels did.”

“Yeah, but they lost their vessels, too,” Dean recalled, “Cas still has—does he still have his vessel?”

“Yes.”

“So something’s different. Maybe whatever happened to him sent him into Crazy Town. ...Is it possible Jimmy’s back in—”

“Definitely not,” Meg interjected, “He’s Clarence, I don’t have a doubt about it. He’s been asking for you.”

“Me?”

“Yes,” she confirmed, “...Well, when he’s talking, anyway.”

“Where is he?”

“In a private room. Come on, I’ll take you there. I think one of the other nurses is in there with him now.”

“You left him with another nurse?” Sam called to her, sounding alarmed. “What if he tells her—”

“What?” She scoffed, “That he’s an angel? That you two are monster hunters? That I’m a demon? Those claims are run-of-the-mill around here. Trust me, even if he did spill all of your secrets, nobody would believe him. Nobody in here, anyway.”

“Still. I don’t like it,” Dean argued. 

“Well, you’re the boyfriend. It doesn’t matter anyway, you’ll be taking him home with you tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes. You’re already listed as his relatives—as far as they’re concerned he’s James Jonas, your husband, Dean.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what I put in your records,” she smirked. “Come on. We don’t want to keep Clarence waiting.”

—————

As the hunters and the demon approached the private room Castiel was staying in, his voice began to carry into the hallway they were walking through. 

“I used to have wings like that bird, you know. They were huge, with soft feathers I liked to wrap around myself when I got cold. That was generally frowned upon by the other angels in Heaven. They were exceptionally warm, though, especially when I was wandering the Earth to interact with my Father’s creations. ...I once thought I was my father, you know….”

Meg cleared her voice as she approached the door, prompting the nurse—a small blonde woman with hair that brushed against the shoulder of her blue scrubs and wore a slightly terrified look on her face—to flee the room, rushing back towards the nursing station on the other side of the hallway. 

“...Cas,” Dean called, stepping in front of Meg to look into the room. 

He looked around the room once before his gaze adjusted itself. There was Castiel, in the middle of the room, lying on his side on the floor. He was wearing the patient outfit of white pants and a white shirt with a wide neckline that contrasted starkly against his usual button-up. They had apparently given him back his trenchcoat, but Dean noticed that the belt had been removed, and the sleeves were tied together in a knot that prevented him from wearing it. Instead, he was lying on the floor with the coat over his head, one of his hands picking at a loose thread. 

“Cas,” he repeated, walking further towards his angel. “Cas, buddy, it’s me, Dean.”

“Dean?” Cas parroted without moving the coat off his head. “Why are you here? Are you in the hospital, too?”

“No, Cas,” he answered, stuck between amusement and heartbreak. “Cas, we’re here to take you home.”

“Home?” He parroted again. “No.”

“You don’t want to come home?” Dean puzzled, staring at the coat that was covering his friend’s face. 

“My home is gone. It burned. It’s locked.”

“No,” Dean corrected, taking another step forward before sitting down in front of the angel’s lying form. “You have another home. You have...you have a home with us. With Sam and me. Right, Sam?”

“Of course, Cas, yeah,” Sam answered from his place at the doorway.

“They said I can’t leave anyway,” he replied matter-of-factly. “I’m broken. They have to fix me.”

“You’re not broken, Cas.”

“They said I was.”

“Yeah, well, fuck them,” he answered, finally out of reasonable responses. “Can I take this coat off your head?”

“No,” he answered urgently, but made no move to secure the coat. “I have to hide it.”

“Hide what?”

“My face,” Cas whispered, almost inaudible through the fabric of his coat. “I have to hide my face. Clay. Mud.”

“You have mud on your face?”

“No,” Cas was clearly getting frustrated. “My face is clay and mud.”

“O...kay,” Dean thought for a moment. “What does that mean?”

“Clay. Mud,” he repeated, pulling at the loose thread a bit more aggressively now. “My face is clay. It changes. It’s not real...it will never be real. It never stays the same. It’s mud...it slides, and it dries, and then it slides again...it never stays the same.”

“Okay,” Dean agreed, trying to soothe the angel. “I…I just haven’t seen your face in a long time.”

“It’s not the same face,” Cas assured, though Dean wasn’t really sure what it was he was assuring. 

“Okay,” he conceded. “Can you get up with that over your face?”

“Yes. I can walk from my room, to the cafeteria, to the rec room, to the—”

“That’s great, Cas,” Sam interrupted gently. “Meg, are we all good to go?”

“Yeah, I already had him signed out. Clarence,” she called, “Come on, get up, it’s time to go.”

“Go?” He repeated. “Where?”

“Home,” Dean answered, reaching out and running a finger over the visible knuckle of Cas’ hand. “We’re going home.”


	4. Things We Lost in the Fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cas' perspective on this whole human thing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is Cas' perspective, so I left most of it unedited and unfiltered. I had him jump from topic to topic because that's what I was doing while writing him. 
> 
> enjoy

Cas had been home for almost three weeks now, and Dean was taking care of him (far better than the hospital nurses had). He hadn't seen Meg since coming to the bunker (Dean calls it home), which made him sad, but he would have been sadder if he’d had to stay there without Dean or Sam. 

 

_ “Ow,” Cas half-deadpanned as his legs hit a bench that he had walked right into.  _

 

_ “Let me help you with that.” An arm reached out and wrapped around the arm of Castiel’s jacket.  _

 

_ Stinging, ruffling fabric, rough prickles pressed against his skin, fingers tightening-- _

 

_ “No!” _

 

Meg had told him that she was going to call his boyfriend, and Cas would have explained that he had several friends of the male gender, but his tongue felt heavy like pudding and his chest felt squishy like jello so he didn’t bother. She returned in five minutes anyway, and told the other nurses that she would give Clarence his medicine. Cas still didn’t know who Clarence was, but his tongue felt thick like mashed potatoes and his chest felt heavy like raw carrots, so he didn’t mention it. 

 

He didn’t like raw carrots. 

 

Dean had offered him a raw carrot that hadn’t made it into the stew (stew wasn’t soup, it was different, even though it wasn’t) he had been cooking all afternoon. Cas took a bite and spit it out because it was rough against his tongue and when his teeth scratched it they felt like they were made of metal. 

 

Cas really didn’t want metal teeth, he decided, because he'd come to dislike most metal things. They were scratchy and loud and when you scraped them they made your ears itch from the inside. Metal teeth would be fifteen times worse, he decided, because you would have to eat things with them, and therefore they would always be scratching things. 

 

“Metal teeth would make my ears itch,” he’d told Dean as he placed the carrot back on the cutting board. 

 

Dean smiled and patted him on the back, and Cas was left wondering if it was a ‘good job’ pat, or a ‘I know, buddy’ pat, or a ‘you’re going to be fine’ pat, or a ‘you’re my friend’ pat, or a ‘I don’t know what to say to that’ pat. All of these human displays of affection were starting to become confusing (even more than they had been when he was an angel). 

 

_ “Cas, could you take your coat off your face?” _

 

_ Broken parts. Broken parts that scream disaster and set off too many alarms in his head. Dean had so many broken things in his life, and he did not deserve another one. Castiel wasn't his problem to solve.  _

 

_ “No.” _

 

A lot of things were becoming more confusing than they had been when he was an angel.

 

He marveled at the fact that he and his brethren used to think that humans were simple creatures with lives less complex than those of ants. It was much more difficult than he had previously thought to maintain a human lifestyle (even with Dean’s help). 

 

He had begun to generally understand his newly developed needs (eat when Dean says, go to the bathroom when Dean says, drink when Dean says, let Sam clean his wings when Dean says, and go to bed when Dean says), but meeting them was proving to be difficult.

 

Dean said that he still shouldn’t eat solid foods, because he didn’t know how, and he might choke if he forgot to chew. Instead they stuck to soup and stew (which were much better than the mush the nurses had fed him in the hospital). Nine times out of ten Dean let him feed himself, but sometimes he needed some help, and Dean said that was okay because everyone needed help when they were first learning to be human. They had gone from one meal a day to two, but Cas’ stomach wasn’t ready to eat a full three after going so long operating as the vessel of an angel. It was a miracle (Dean said) that he hadn’t died as soon as he lost his grace. 

 

The bathroom was equally as challenging. Castiel had lived centuries as an angelic being who didn’t need to use the bathroom (he didn’t have a bladder), and consequently failed to recognize the signs of “having to go”, as Dean called it. Sam had gone out to the store one evening and returned with adult diapers that would help Cas if he forgot to go to the bathroom. 

 

(He didn’t need those, because he was going to get this eventually. He is a centuries-old being with millions of years of experience, and learning to direct my urine into a bowl should not take him very long.)

 

“Thank you,” he’d said without looking up from his feet. 

 

And why did humans have to stare at each other when they spoke? There were so many more interesting things they could be looking at. How humans kept their eyes on another human’s face for that long would always be a mystery to the fallen angel. He preferred to let his eyes wander while his ears stayed stationary. He guessed it was one of the many rules of humanity that he would simply never understand (like pants. What was the point in pants, as long as you had underpants? It just seemed irrational to wear both, especially if they weren’t comfortable). Dean and Sam always looked at him when they spoke to him, and it made him uncomfortable, having eyes boring into his head while he was trying to focus on what they were saying. It was slightly counterproductive, he decided (though he wasn't in a position to be judging other people’s social interactions). 

 

He found the act of drinking just as counterproductive. Why drink all this water if you’re just going to pee it out again? He had to admit that his father had some flaws in his creation of the human race. Though he did have to acknowledge that he himself had a bias against drinking, it being something new that he wasn’t entirely used to yet. He had eaten food as an angel (even if he wasn’t being given the same kind of food now), but he had never drank. The nurses stuck his arm with a needle when he didn’t drink, and they said that made him drink without really having to drink (which made no sense), but Dean didn’t have those kinds of needles. Castiel has to drink water every few hours with a straw, which he’d found was easier to adjust to than sipping straight from the cup. 

 

Cas was scared of the straw too, at first, but Dean had found one that had a bee sitting in the middle of it, and the wings flapped when you drank through the straw. That had been tempting enough to draw the fallen angel’s lips to the plastic. After that first sip things went relatively smoothly, even though he still disliked the foreign feeling of cold water slipping down his throat. 

 

Castiel was finding that he found a lot of things foreign now that he was a human. As an angel he thought that he understood the beauty of a flower garden, but as a human his entire perception was changed. There were so many details that his angelic senses had just failed to comprehend--the rubbing of the petals against each other when the wind blew by, the waving of the grass, the way dirt molded beneath his feet, the way the way the wind flooded his senses when it rolled over his face.

 

It was all so new, so foreign, even though he had stood in the bed of a flower garden thousands of times over his life. He felt that this newfound human perspective had bloomed inside him, growing over the grave of his wings the way trees sprung up from the corpses of acorns. 

 

Maybe he was ready to stop mourning what he had lost, what he had wanted himself to be, and start engaging with who he had become. 

 

After all, he was a Winchester now, and he had to keep fighting; because that’s what Winchesters do. 


End file.
